04 Nov Essential Guide for SaaS Business Owners: Three Things You Should Focus On

Companies estimate that around 70% of the apps they use are SaaS-based. And with cloud technology becoming more accessible, secure, and convenient, that number is bound to become even higher, with the same survey predicting a rise to 85% by 2025. But just because it’s a great time to be a SaaS company owner doesn’t mean success comes automatically.

On the contrary, if you want to grow your business, you need to follow sound business practices that put the customer first and prioritize lasting building relationships. That’s because when you decide, “I want to sell my SaaS business,” you want to be in a position to do that as profitably as possible.

To help you figure out what to focus on when looking for ways to grow your SaaS company, let’s look at three things that are all but guaranteed to have a positive impact.

Prioritize Customer Support

Customer support is at the very heart of any successful SaaS business. No matter how good your product might be, if you can’t provide outstanding support and solve customer problems, you will have difficulty getting your current customers to stay.

The good news, many customer support tools can help streamline processes and maintain high-quality support based on the industry’s best practices. For example, you can set up comprehensive documentation that lets your customers and support team access relevant information quickly.

You can also implement omnichannel customer service that encompasses live chat, messaging, chatbots, and other forms of communication and include social media platforms in your support system to maximize convenience for your customers.

Technology can make all of these processes easier and more affordable, allowing even small SaaS startups on a shoestring budget to provide top-tier support that can rival even the biggest and most established competitors on the market.

Perform Thorough Audience Research

One of the biggest advantages you can gain in your market is providing relevant and unique solutions for a very specific audience. If you can succeed at that, it won’t matter how big your competitors are, as you’ll be able to provide personalized solutions that will be almost impossible to match.

But for that to happen, you need to take the time to understand your audience on a fundamental level, not making assumptions about anything and verifying that everything you think your audience needs is actually backed up by their own opinions.

In part, that can be achieved by researching your competitors, going through reviews, and reading what your target audience is talking about on relevant forums. But to really dig down and identify exactly what your ideal customers want, you will need to engage with them directly and ask their opinion on questions you need to be answered.

The best way to get detailed information is to interview your customers and leads individually. That way, you can follow up on your questions, gouge reactions, and gain surprising insights in directions you weren’t planning to go.

If you want to take a broader approach to audience research for SaaS businesses, you can organize surveys that will help you get more data. But for the surveys to be helpful, make sure to really zero in on what you want to learn and figure out the specific questions that will help you get those answers as definitely as possible.

Utilize Email Marketing

Despite the abundance of marketing approaches SaaS companies can use, email remains king in terms of the ability to reach leads and customers consistently, as well as the ROI that you can expect. Develop an effective email marketing strategy throughout your customer journey. You can improve almost every part of your performance, including onboarding, churn rate, engagement, lifetime value, and much more.

But while sending emails regularly will almost always be better than not doing anything, you should take the time to develop email marketing campaigns that serve a specific purpose, establishing KPIs and then working on improving them after every email.

Over time, email will become your primary tool for growth and customer acquisition. You’ll be able to automate large parts of the customer onboarding, nurturing, and sales processes, freeing up your team’s time to focus on manual tasks and personalized interactions with your audience.

And if you set up and perfect trigger-based emails that get sent when a user performs (or doesn’t perform) a specific action within the app, you can actually replace a lot of the in-person interactions that would be required, providing timely and relevant guidance and solving problems before customers even find the time to reach out to you with them.

Bottom Line

Launching a successful SaaS product can be an incredibly rewarding and lucrative experience. But to make it happen, more than merely having a good idea is required; you need to follow proven processes and develop an experience your customers will love.

The above strategies will serve as an excellent foundation for building a solid SaaS business that will consistently attract new leads, convert them into customers, and get those customers to stay over the long term. They will also build a reputation for your business that will make pitching to future prospects much easier since they will trust the positive experiences that your SaaS brand can create.